When the Levee Breaks

I close the desk at eight in the morning. Sometimes Hank Crow relieves me at eight—but relieve is kind of a strong word since Hank’s not really on duty until noon, but he’ll come and sit at the desk, which is, it’s pretty obvious, better to him than being alone. Hank Crow comes downstairs and he looks older than normal to me—his face looks gray as concrete.

“Anything exciting?” he says.

I give him the highlights.

“Fetal pigs?” he says. “What doesn’t that boy sell?”

I tell him he’s got me, and we walk out front and Hank offers me a cigarette. I’m trying to quit, but I figure I didn’t buy and I need something to mellow me out, so I take one of his Pall Malls. He lights mine first, then his.

It’s that kind of sun-washed California day that makes the world look like an overexposed picture. Like everyone’s eyes got caught in the flash and we spend the rest of the day blinking and waiting to see things right again. The sun hurts my eyes, but feels good on my forehead and arms and I feel the morning air mingle with the cigarette smoke and get refreshed in some way.

We look out at the people waiting for the Blue Line North train, and the cars stopped at the light on Long Beach Boulevard, which the old men in the town, Hank Crow included, still call by its original name, American Avenue. I’m looking at the faces of people in the cars, pasty and blank as drywall, all going to work at something they probably despise.

“You ever look at people and wonder what they all do?” I say.

“I don’t follow,” Hank says.

“Just look at them and see them on their way to their jobs and wonder what they think about all day. What they do all day?”

“You mean job people?” Hank says. “Office people?”

“Right,” I say. I’ve painted some offices, but I’ve never worked in one and they seem about as attractive as POW camps to me. The whole straight world of employment is so alien—and if I was ever going to find out what it was like, it’s too late now. A man can’t get to his midthirties without ever having had a real job and expect to get one. It depresses me for a moment when I realize how limited my prospects are, but then I realize I’m getting depressed about not having an office job and I feel stupid. It’s like when assholes don’t invite you to some lame-ass party and you get upset. Not that you wanted to go, but you didn’t want to be left out.

I think about back when I tried to do a résumé, this is a few years ago, this is when Cheryl was still trying to improve me, when it mattered to her what kind of person I was. So I do the résumé, it was video editing for some local commercial company, and I lie and I fudge and manipulate enough to make myself look half decent, but I get all hung up on the “Objectives” section. I asked her what it was for and she said the employer wanted to know what I wanted to achieve, what I wanted from the job. Other than make money I couldn’t, and still can’t, imagine what could possibly go in that line. Why else would anyone ever want to go to work?

“I was an office person for a while,” Hank says. “A suit driver.” He looks at me. “You know those people you see on the freeway, their suits hanging in the back?”

“I don’t see you as a suit driver,” I say.

“I wasn’t really,” he says. “I was a plant—an insider for the revolution. I was supposed to turn the office against the oppressors. I was supposed to act like one of the yahoos.”

I hear words like revolution and oppressor and I think they sound as old and dusty and quaint as horseless carriage and I can’t believe that people ever had enough faith in anything to think there could be a better world. It’s not so much I think they were bad or wrong, I just can’t imagine it. It’s like believing in God; it’s just shit I can’t fathom.

I say, “Where was this?”

“IBM.”

“Didn’t work, huh? Your revolution?”

Hank starts to say something, but the ground begins to rumble and I feel deep vibrations in my feet and figure it’s an earthquake. I start to make for the doorway and then realize the Lincoln’s a brick building, which is not where you want to be in a quake. Before I make it back from the door, though, there a deep watery hiss coming from the street, or, rather below the street right in front of our curb.

Hank takes a step back and stands next to me under our awning.

It sounds like a waterfall, but I can’t see anything and I start to wonder if I’m hearing things, but the morning crowd’s coming out of Wang’s, and the drivers in their cars are stretching to see what’s going on, so I figure it’s real, whatever the hell it is.

The rumble gets louder and the sound reminds me of my bus accident so many Christmases ago. Metal groans and snaps. The ground starts to buck a bit, it rises and falls like old wood bleachers do when people jump next to you. The rushing-water sound gets louder until the street opens up and water starts gurgling up.

This isn’t some cartoon fountain, this is not James Dean striking oil and getting happy with the mess and yee-haw whooping it up with his cowboy hat and decking the mean Rock Hudson, but more of a slow, menacing fart of city water oozing up out of the street.

A slab of Long Beach Boulevard, not twenty feet from where me and Hank Crow are standing, drops in on itself and swallows the rear end of a light blue Toyota Celica. The guy driving it screams.

“Sinkhole,” Hank Crow says.

The guy gets out of the Toyota and looks back at his wheel sunken into the road. More people have rushed out into the street and are looking out windows. Car horns blow. The water’s spreading and starting to back up instead of heading down the city drain that exits into the harbor. It rises and starts to lap at the top of the curb and threatens to come onto the sidewalk.

“Water-main break,” Hank Crow says. He keeps smoking his cigarette and seems as calm as if this happens every day, regular as a city bus. “This’ll slow down the yahoos for a while.”